AMD responds to NVIDIA’s “Pick Your Path” campaign

A few days ago NVIDIA made its high-end graphics cards a bit more appealing by bundling three free games with the purchase of a GeForce GTX 980, GTX 970, GTX 780 Ti or GTX 780 card from a qualifying partner in a campaign called “Pick Your Path”. Of course you won’t get all three games for free – instead you get to choose one game out of all of them and this is why the campaign is called “Pick Your Path”. You can’t really complain, though, as this hardware is worth it and then the holiday season is right around the corner, so it is good to have a mighty GPU and a nice game to play when the time comes.

Now AMD does pretty much the same thing and then something more. Starting now AMD bundles its high-end Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X and R9 290 video solutions with Sid Meyer’s Civilization: Beyond Earth. Of course you must get your new Radeon from a qualifying retailer in order to participate. There’s no choice here in the AMD camp but then again this is better than nothing.

You may wonder why AMD bundles Sid Meyer’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, which does not demand a fast GPU with a high-end card but there is a reason. Read below:

“I personally have enjoyed more than 500 hours of game time with the Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise, and I’m thrilled by what AMD and Firaxis Games have done with the Mantle graphics API to make Beyond Earth a smooth, high-performance marvel,” said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, ISV/IHV Partner Group, AMD. “AMD believes that gamers should freely experience that remarkable development work, and our new Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth promotion offers exactly that as a ‘thank you’ to new AMD Radeon customers.”

Well, the answer is hidden there – AMD works closely with Firaxis Games and the collaboration brings numerous optimization techniques and support for various AMD technologies that AMD wants to display in the graphics-game combo described above. There’s nothing wrong in that as Sid Meyer’s Civilization: Beyond Earth fully supports AMD Mantle, while the cards themselves offer AMD Eyefinity and 4K Ultra HD. Given you get two of these cards you can also make use of AMD CrossFire for awesome framerates. The game also makes use of the new 8 GB line of the Radeon R9 290X and makes full use of the extremely spacious frame buffer. AMD says that the Radeon R9 290X with 8 GB of memory and Mantle renders Sid Meyer’s Civilization: Beyond Earth faster than any other GPU out there.

We kept the sweetest part of the deal for the end of this article – starting now all AMD Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X and R9 290 cards are simultaneously eligible for the so-called Never Settle: Space Edition promotion. With a qualifying purchase customers can receive a Radeon Gold Reward coupon good for three free games from a list with more than 25 titles to choose from. When combined with Sid Meyer’s Civilization: Beyond Earth you can get four games for free. How does this sound?

Source: AMD